For those in the know : why do my BW raw files ,shot as BW, not stay BW when they are opened in a raw converter? They look right in my (Breeze) browser. I suspect I might have to run raw+jpg to get the information all the information across intact. The camera I use is a Nikon D200.
Cheers

A raw file is unprocessed data from the sensor, so regardless of the mode you're shooting in, or image settings you apply, it still contains data for all pixels setup to capture red, green and blue (which is controlled by the RGB filter array over the photosites, so that each pixel is only sensitive to one color).

Raw converters are usually going to use a demosaic process that renders a color image (by combining the values captured by the photosites so that red, green and blue are represented at each pixel in the final image). Some raw converters may honor your camera settings (to an extent, so that they might convert the color image to Black and White if that's the way you set your camera, while still giving you the option to render it differently as desired). But, I'd be surprised if many converters handled it that way (converting it to black and white for you by default).

So, it seems i'm stuck with JPG when I want to shoot BW . Or is there such a thing as a plugin for BW "conversion" available for Capture1? I know Bibble has got one, but my version of Bibble has got corrupted and no amount of trickery will fix it. Anyway, Capture1 gives better results . But it would be nice to get BW from raw within that program without going through Photoshop, which for some reason gives poor BW conversion, channel mixer & all. Anyone got any bright ideas?
Ta. Alf